The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,20

condiment rack and tips it back into his mouth like a drunken sailor. Good Lord, Jack, really?

—

Back on deck, Sam is nowhere to be found. Have we been gone that long? Jack seems unconcerned as he munches on the chicken leg. He seems to have gotten over his phobia about the meal plan. We circle the boat, stem to stern, my adrenaline picking up with every passing minute. Why did I leave him out here alone? I notice the chicken lady standing almost exactly where we last saw Sam. She’s clutching the railing and the wind is whipping her hair into a cylinder shape on top of her head, like it’s being sucked up by a vacuum.

“My brother,” I say to her, “he was standing right here, looking for whales. Did you see him?”

She sniffs the air. As she turns, her hair rockets skyward and the wind grabs it and whips it in the opposite direction as if an invisible puppeteer is operating from above. It would be comical if I weren’t so worried about Sam.

“Did you see my brother?” I am inches from her face. She says nothing and I grab her by the shoulders, gently shaking her into focus. It’s like holding on to a cobweb. At first I think she’s going to disintegrate right in my hands, but then she grabs my cheeks and pulls me right up to her face. Her breath is old and dusty. “Nobody knows what it’s like to be you. Nobody! Do you hear me?”

I close my eyes. I can feel Jack without even seeing him. He has thrown his arms around the woman’s waist and he’s hugging her so tight, it slowly makes her loosen her grip and drop her fingers from my burning cheeks. I hear Jack’s voice shushing her. “It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s all right.”

If this is the only person who saw what happened to Sam, we are in trouble. I doubt she will ever be able to tell us anything. Suddenly I am the one made of thin, wispy cobwebs, in danger of blowing away bit by bit.

After Dora won the Ice Classic, a lot of kids in Birch Park started getting ideas. If she could win, then maybe it was possible that other kids from our neighborhood could get a lucky break, too. Everybody wanted to grab on tight and hitch a ride on the skirts of Dora’s success. But I wasn’t fooled.

I had been right about holding my breath and not believing when something is too good to be true. Gran found Ray’s white T-shirt and threw it in the wash, not knowing at all whose it was or what it meant. The smell of cedar was completely washed out of it by the time I heard that he was dating Della May, one of the new girls who had moved up from Outside. I had been too embarrassed to face Mrs. Stevens again, and Ray let me know pretty quickly that he wanted a girlfriend who would sleep over, not one who just talked on the telephone late at night.

At first I told Gran that I probably had the flu, which I hoped was true. After a while I knew it couldn’t be that—I’m pretty sure she did, too, but she said nothing—not even when I stole a whole box of saltines and took them to school to keep in my locker.

Ray would walk by sometimes and act like we’d never even met. He and Della May sounded like a bad country western song, and she always walked with her arm linked through his, as if she might suddenly end up back in Texas if she wasn’t tethered to him every second. There are worse things that could happen to you, I thought, but who was I to warn her?

She had a funny accent, and when she said his name she’d drag the A out so long, I could hear it even after they’d turned the corner by the broken water fountain.

Then I’d stare at the water fountain, wishing it had magical powers and would bubble up a secret potion that I could drink and my life could go back in time. I’d even settle for just as far back as that swim meet—when he flicked me on the butt with a towel and asked me to come to a party—so I could say no. But this broken fountain hadn’t even bubbled up water the entire time I’d been at this school,